Tour tech pointers and tutorials. Focused on web services for the travel industry.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Creating an opentravel SOAP client and server for testing using soapui

If you are creating a web services client or server in the Travel Industry, you are probably using the opentravel messaging schema.

Sometimes the most difficult part of your project is creating a test client or server to verify your application code.

soapui is a great open source utility for easily creating manual and automated SOAP test suites.

I'm going to show you how to quickly set up a SOAP test client and a SOAP test server for an opentravel message pair using soapui.

The first thing you will need is a WSDL file. Luckily the ota-tools project has many open source resources for opentravel users, including a soapui project with sample WSDL file that we can use as a template.

You can download this WSDL file from the ota-tools source repository at:

In the dialog box, click the browse button and open the wsdl file that you just edited:

Give your project and name and click 'OK'

Generate a default service

and give it a name:

Now you are ready to start your mock service. Click on the green 'Go' button in the upper left. Now your service is running and you can call it from soapui or the opentravel client that you are developing.

Now let's test our service. Open the sample request and,

press the green 'Go' button in the upper left. You should have a response message on your screen.

Voilà!

Now you are ready to add some logic to your soapui test server and create a soapui client test suite. You will find a nice project with examples in the ota-tools soapui project.